Years ago, a thing called geomorphs were somewhat popular among D&D gamers. They are essentially square puzzle pieces of a dungeon, cavern, or some kind of a moduler map with the edges of each piece tileable with other pieces.

Instead of using White Wash City PDFs (which I personally think $90 for a bunch of PDFs is extremely overpriced, just my opinion), or buying a bunch of O scale buildings, or even building them myself out of foamboard....

....thinking of doing a Dundjinni/Campaign Cartographer style map, gridded to a 1" scale, and then cut into pieces and glued onto foamcore board.

The result would be a building and the immediate surrounding squares on one piece that can be placed beside another with a different house/building/road/etc.

You can have essentially the same generic town but lay them out differently for each town.

Anyone ever do that? Curious to hear of any methods, tricks or ideas others used tackling this project.

I think I'll just leave them flat with a top-down view and non-directional shadows. I'd like to go the distance on 3D building, but I just don't foresee the motivation to take on that large of a project._________________

I have almost all my Legos I've ever had, so one day we used those. We take four of the green tiles and build on that. We've played with a projector over a table, white boards, etc, and we like the Legos. We can customize the mini and with all the new sets no genre is out of reach.

I not a fan of static maps, but there was a white boards style map that fit together like a jig saw puzzle at one point, and I like those..._________________Ju Ju

Well just playing on the weekends with my friends, yah, we use a grid-covered white foamcore board. I taped a piece of plexiglass over the surface. It's not too big but it works as a dry eraser board.

But the geomorphs are necessary for the conventions. I don't like bringing the old brown grid mats to a convention. Especially Gen Con. People have to pay to play my game, I put demand in myself to make it worth their money.

A 3D town of a generic Deadlands town would be nice, and could be done. However, I think for the fact I have to travel to get to Indy, I think the geomorphs are a better way to go.

I started last night on the first tile. I could get Dundjinni, but with a copy of Photoshop, well, Dundjinni can be avoided.

Plus all the user-created items on their website provides ample supply of overlays that will fit nicely.

I'll post up the first tile after I'm done. Nearly done already._________________

That is, have a mostly flat play area on foamcore, but have the floors/interiors of buildings and the "boardwalk" on another layer of foamcore, to give a bit of visual separation - and then, possibly have wall sections represented with thin segments of foamcore, for further dimension - even though you wouldn't have full three-dimension representation by any means. I've thought of doing something similar to that for games of Robo-Rally, because while the full color boards are interesting to look at, it's easy to miss a wall here or a floor level change there at a convention when the board section is across the table and there are flag markers and robot markers cluttering up the field. Even a shallow bit of dimension can help to make things "pop out" visually.

Another advantage is that you wouldn't necessarily have to have a complete representation of a cowtown in its entirety. You could piece it together with different terrain textures. That is, have some stock patchy grass/dirt for the bulk of the board. For each building, start with a basic repeating wooden plank texture for the boardwalk out front, and various interior floor textures (tiled wooden plank, or carpet, as appropriate) for the inside. The raised wall sections could just be BLACK, since you're looking at a cross-section of the wall, essentially. Furnishings could be either flat items, or 3D, depending on your resources. You could just make them separate pieces and drop them into a separate container for transport - and by having them be separate furnishings, you leave players options to move things around (such as tipping at able over to use it for cover in a shoot-out, or hauling furniture to block doorways if you're holing up versus an invasion of zombies from Boot Hill).

I've got a few decks of basic floor textures in tiled format, for use in tabletop gaming, with the idea that you'd cut out the room dimensions you need: http://greywolf.critter.net/tiles.htm (Dungeon Grab Bag #2 is particularly made with this sort of use in mind.)_________________

Going off with what you said, here's a few tilesets. I haven't broken the buildings down or the elements within, but it's a start.

I know I didn't make the walls totally vertical like something such as Dundjinni or Campaign Cartographer would produce. This style I did is just a personal preference. It removes the outter ring of squares but shows more of the building and sign.

The stagecoaches, cacti, animals, etc. will all be mounted on foamcore just like the main tilesets. They can be arranged anyway on the grid so you can custom change the layout of each tileset.

*Note - The bulls at the bottom are highlighted red as I plan on using them as the gorgon stampede. The tumbleweed of course it's a given there.